More customization to be done, still far from the goal. Just minor tweaks this time.

Fix disappeared Explorer jump list

Not quite a customization, but I will include it here never the less. As you perhaps have spotted in the last post, I do not have either “Recent” or “Pinned” entries in my Explorer jump list. This is caused by a bug in win7 which has been known since the beta days, yet it still appears to be unfixed.

The reason appears to be that the file containing the jump list entries have been corrupted. You can find the files here: (You must enter the path, you can’t navigate to the folder!)

%AppData%MicrosoftWindowsRecentAutomaticDestinations

The file containing the Explorer jump list is “1b4dd67f29cb1962.automaticDestinations-ms”, just delete it to get it working again. However if you experience this issue with another application, simply delete all entries (to the Recycle Bin) and pin a entry to that application. The file that now appears is the jump list for that application. Simply press CTRL+Z to undo the previous delete and select “Don’t move” when it attempts to undelete the broken file.

Change locations of user folders

You can move your “My Documents” folder by right-clicking it and clicking “Properties”. Click “Move…” under the “Location” tab. (It will ask whether you want to move the current contents to the new location.) You can do this for most of the folders in %USERPROFILE%, for example your Desktop.

I use a separate HDD partion (D:) for all my data so I can easily format the system drive and reinstall Windows without loosing anything important. Since applications sometimes save user data or other strange stuff in those automatically, I moved them all to “D:userconfWindows”. It will make a reinstall a little bit easier.

I also started to stop using “My Documents”, “My Music” and “My Videos” completely. The “My Documents” folder in particular is misused by many applications so all kinds of weird stuff ends up here, removing my attention from what I’m actually trying to store in those folders.

Modify the Start menu

As more and more entries get into the start menu, it gets increasingly harder to find the programs you want. You can edit it by changing the contents this the following two folders:

The first folder is for your user, the second is for all users. The entries in the first will automatically be merged together with the second.

Notice that if you start editing these folders, then the shortcuts will not be automatically deleted when you uninstall the application since the paths have changed.

Notice that I prefix folders which contains several applications with “#”, this makes them stand on the top of the list. (You can’t do this on top-level folders of some reason though, it will not merge the user and all user folder correctly.) To make the folders which contains several applications stand out I the icon (the method is explained in the last section). Also note that I have the “HxD” program listed twice, an easy to reach shortcut at the top and a folder containing the uninstaller and more.

You can also change the paths of these two Start Menu folders by doing the same as explained in the previous section. I have moved all normal shortcuts into the all-user folder and I moved the user folder to “D:userconfWindows”. In this folder I placed links to all the portable applications I have on my D: drive, so these will survive after a reinstall. (It requires that the drive letter remains the same though.)

Extending Aero Snap

EDIT: multi-monitor support was removed from the free version and I found a better alternative, WinSplit Revolution. I find this one better and it is completely free, so check out that one instead. EDIT END

Aero Snap doesn’t work very well when using multiple monitors and it doesn’t give you as many possibilities as similar solutions in Linux. Luckily there are a few tools out there to replace it. I tried two and settled on AqauSnap.

AqauSnap only supports simple grid operations, like right-upper corner, but I do not need more than that anyway. Multi-monitor support and with a bit of tweaking okay graphics. Hotkeys are implemented, however it doesn’t work well across monitors. Furthermore you can’t undock a maximized window with the mouse.

All in all, it works better than Aero Snap, but there is still room for improvement. You can download it from the authors homepage or read more about it here.

Disabling the desktop

The desktop easily ends up being cluttered because you trow all kinds of random stuff into it. Most of the time it is just stuff I just dump there because I’m too lazy to properly navigate to the folder it should have been in. So I will try force myself do it properly from the start.

Hiding the icons is easy, just right-click on the desktop and uncheck “View->Show desktop icons”. (You should pin the Recycle Bin to Explorer first though.)

This doesn’t prevent you from saving stuff here, it just hides it. However you can change the permissions for the Desktop folder and disallow Write operations. To do this, right-click on your Desktop folder (located in %USERPROFILE%) and click “Properties”. Under the “Security” tab, click “Edit…”. In this window, check the “Deny” box for “Write” for the users you want to restrict.

If you restricted the right users it should now give you an error message if you try to save/move anything to the desktop. I fear it might annoy some installers which want to create shortcuts on the desktop, but I don’t think it will be a major issue.

Using folder icons

Using visual clues to locate a folder instead of relying on reading the text makes it much easier to find. If you have a fitting .ico file, changing the icon is painless.

Right-click the folder and click “Properties”. Under the “Customize” tab, click “Change Icon…” at the bottom. Click “Browse…” to select the .ico file you want to use. (The list is used in case you select a .dll or .exe which contains multiple icons.)

If the folder icon does not update, try pressing F5 a couple of times. To get most out of folder icons, only apply them to your most used folders as it makes them stand out more.

I have installed Ubuntu on my school laptop to try testing an alternative desktop environment. Furthermore I have spend quite some time trying to customize it in order to fit it to my liking so I thought, shouldn’t I try the same with my Windows 7 computer?

So it is time for regedit again. (I wouldn’t brother with a disclaimer, if something goes wrong, just do a clean reinstall of Windows. Works every time.)

For some of these tweaks you need to set your permissions before you are allowed to change the key. To do this, right-click the key and select permissions and make the necessary changes. (See the “Hiding Homegroup, Favorites…” article for details.)

Changing the login screen image

I have grown a little tired of the default screen, while it is pretty it doesn’t quite match my wallpaper. Changing this was actually pretty easy. In win7 MS makes it possible to change this for OEM versions, so you can just do the same yourself. First the feature need to be enabled, so go to the registry key:

Create a new dword and call it “OEMBackground” if it does not exits already and set the value to “1” (true).

Now open the folder located at:

%windir%System32oobeinfobackgrounds

(%windir% directs to your windows folder btw.) Create the “info” and “backgrounds” folders yourself if they do not exist already. Now you just need to place your image in this folder and call it “backgroundDefault.jpg”. All articles I have read says the file size should be kept below 256KB.

Customizing Windows Explorer

The file browser is a crucial part of your OS and sometime you might spend a lot of time in, so optimizing your work flow here greatly effects your total experience.

Setting a default folder

When you open Explorer it shows your Libraries, however I never use them so it is pretty much useless. You can easily change this to another folder by changing the shortcut you access it with (the icon in the taskbar is a shortcut too). You will need to change every shortcut you access Explorer with though.

In the “Target” field under the “Shortcut” tab it normally says “%windir%explorer.exe”. You can add the path to your folder as a parameter and it will open that folder next time you start it. I wanted my D drive to show so I changed it to: “%windir%explorer.exe D:”.

The changes will take effect when explorer.exe has been restarted, you can do this (as suggested) by rebooting, but a quicker solution is to open the task manager, kill explorer.exe and then start it again by using “New Task”.

64 bit editions

In Windows 64-bit the entries will not be hidden in Open or Save dialogs. In order to hide it from these dialogs too you will have to repeat the modifications in:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWow6432NodeClassesCLSID{xxxxxxx}ShellFolder

Adding entires to Favorites

You can add the current folder by right-clicking on Favorites and click “Add current location to Favorites”. However you can also do it manually by adding links in your Links folder, located at “%USERPROFILE%Links”.

Notice that you can place links not only to folders, but also to files and applications if you want. Additionally, drag-and-drop still work on applications, so if you for example place a shortcut to a Hex viewer application, you can just drag a file into that link and it will open it.

My current setup

Disabling “Minimize on shake” mouse gesture

This gesture is quite annoying for me as I’m using a high-dpi mouse which have a tendency to shake a little bit when I move it with high speed and then stop it abruptly. I don’t take much notice of it myself, but it is sometimes enough to trigger that gesture. (Which I can’t figure out how to trigger again, leaving me to restore all windows manually…)

Adding workspaces

Workspaces in Linux certainly is a nice feature and is quite nicely implemented too. So I have looked for similar solutions for Windows 7, but there isn’t quite anything which is done as well as it is on Linux.

I have just installed Dexpot 1.6, as this appeared to be one of the better implementations out there. (Notice that 1.6 is in beta. As I use 2 monitors, I need the multi-monitor support added in 1.6 (I think).)

I have just installed it so can’t say much about it yet, but it seems to work and have all the functionality wanted. (You need to enable much of it manually though.) Appears a bit sluggish and not as fancy compared to Linux though.

Next up

I will continue with customizing Windows Explorer, more precisely file-handling. That is the default application certain file-types should open with, the icon, the right-click menu of those and templates for creating new files. I know quite a bit about it already, but I want to try custom thumbnail generation and such first.